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ShauryaT, what I understand from his talk is that the fellow wants to re-institute birth based caste system for all professions. This cannot possibly be a good idea.ShauryaT wrote: Let me come to the defense of Shri Nishchalananda Saraswati ji. First, Thanks for posting the video. To understand what the Shankaracharya is saying one has to really understand our purusharthas/objectives and then understand that our systems of VarnAshrama were to meet those objectives. Many of the critics misunderstand this basic premise of what VarnAshrama is trying to do and the inevitable comparisons with western systems and paradigms follow as result of this misdiagnosis. The comparisions and contrasts with European experiences of class and organized church and the experiences of another people's history quickly follow, leading to a complete mess and muddled thinking amongst even folks sympathetic to indic systems.
The statement that major technology developments have been disruptive in nature certainly affects the nature of VarnAshrama as practiced in a given time frame, however, it does not change the basic nature of the objectives. IOW: One is free to evolve the VarnAshrama or even junk it - as long as the focus of the system is on those objectives. My humble submission is an evolved VaranAshrama and correspondingly an evolved Dharma Shatra is the need of the hour. However, this is possible once we are done with the kool-aid our current society is on based on the individual, a rights-based framework and equality. Technology has changed, systems have, not man and his quest to define what is considered righteous. This sense of what is right involves not just the individual but man, a social being, has to expand this to the family, the community, the nation and the worlds. People like me call this system Sanatana Dharma.
So-called Orthodox like the Shankaracharya are the true preservers of this Dharma. We can evolve the means and methods but the objectives have to remain the same.
FantasticA_Gupta wrote:One hour.
"Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism" - Jakob De Roover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaK5prUZp4o
Greg Johnson, an influential theorist with a doctorate in philosophy from Catholic University of America, argues that “Christianity is one of the main causes of white decline” and a “necessary condition of white racial suicide.” Johnson edits a website that publishes footnoted essays on topics that range from H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger, where a common feature is its subject’s criticisms of Christian doctrine. “Like acid, Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood,” writes Gregory Hood, one of the website’s most talented essayists. It is “the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.”
Against Christianity it makes two related charges. Beginning with the claim that Europe effectively created Christianity—not the other way around—it argues that Christian teachings have become socially and morally poisonous to the West. A major work of alt-right history opens with a widely echoed claim: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”
All cultures are unique, but some are more unique than others. “We men of the Western culture are an exception,” Spengler claims. At the heart of his book is an interpretation of the culture he named “Faustian,” a term widely used in the intellectual circles of the alt-right. As with all cultures, a single idea permeates the arts and sciences of the West. Its distinctive mark is an intense striving for “infinity.” According to Spengler, our culture has uniquely sought to see all things in relation to the highest or most distant horizons, which, in turn, it seeks to surpass and extend. The vaults of medieval cathedrals, the discovery of perspective in painting, the exploration of the New World, the development of orchestral music, the invention of the telescope and calculus—in Spengler’s story, all express the Faustian drive toward transcendence.
He arrives at this conclusion by claiming the West begins not with ancient Greece or Rome, but with the high Middle Ages and the birth of scholasticism, Gothic architecture, and polyphony. Here we have the springtime of a “new man and a new world”—and a new religion. Its cultural achievements are not testimonies to faith in God. They are the monuments of Faustian man’s attempt—in speculation, stone, glass, and sound—to propel himself into infinity. Of this aspiration, Spengler maintains, “the Gospels know nothing.”
The basic problem with modernity is “desacralization,” the collapse of spiritual meaning in daily life. Work, family, and citizenship are no longer saturated with spiritual importance, but are understood in functionally secular terms. “Man, like never before, has lost every possibility of contact with metaphysical reality,” Evola complains, because materialism “kills every possibility, deflects every intent, paralyzes every attempt” at living a higher spiritual life. Evola does not, however, call for a return to his ancestral faith. He calls instead for a rediscovery of a more primordial source of spiritual meaning. He referred to these perennial truths as “Tradition,” and he traced the disorders of modernity to our loss of contact with it. He did not date the fatal break to the Enlightenment or to the Reformation. No, the world had been slouching into spiritual poverty ever since the eighth century b.c., when the world of Tradition began to disappear.
Benoist’s case against Christianity is that it forbids the expression of this “Faustian” vitality. It does so by placing the ultimate source of truth outside of humanity, in an otherworldly realm to which we must be subservient. In his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth notoriously described Christian revelation as the “abolition” of natural religion. Benoist is a Barthian, if selectively. He accuses Christianity of crippling our most noble impulses. Christianity makes us strangers in our own skin, conning us into distrusting our strongest intuitions. We naturally respect beauty, health, and power, Benoist observes, but Christianity teaches us to revere the deformed, sick, and weak instead. “Paganism does not reproach Christianity for defending the weak,” he explains. “It reproaches [Christianity] for exalting them in their weakness and viewing it as a sign of their election and their title to glory.”Under Christianity, the West lives under a kind of double imprisonment. It exists under the power of a foreign religion and an alien deity. Christianity is not our religion. It thereby foments “nihilism.” The allegation is explosive. Benoist means that Christianity renders Western culture morally lethargic and culturally defenseless. Most perniciously, its universalism poisons our attachments to particular loyalties and ties.
And here we reach Benoist’s remarkable conclusion. The decadent West has never been more Christian. Christianity imparted to our culture an ethics that has mutated into what the alt-right calls “pathological altruism.” Its self-distrust, concern for victims, and fear of excluding outsiders—such values swindle Western peoples out of a preferential love for their own.
Jihad, Christian ishtyleOn the contrary, in almost all Indian languages religion is translated as dharma and this creates a big cognitive problem for us. Traditionally dharma used to have a very different understanding than what was promoted by the word religion. There is raja-dharma (Duty of a king), Pati-dharma (duty of a husband), patni-dharma (duty of a wife) where dharma is used in the sense of law/duty. And, religion invokes faith, which is never connoted by the word dharma.
In sum, the idea of religion as cultural universal is not only wrong but harmful for the cause of decolonising the Indians.
In the Roman religio, the ritual practices were largely independent of one's belief about god. This was explicitly stated by the Roman statesman Cotta. Religio was defined as anything and everything that is transmitted from the forefathers. Religio was tradition. And, it was kind of a settled argument that no theoretical justification is required to uphold ancestral customs. Therefore, even if one's intellectual journey necessitates a belief that is different from that of his ancestors, he was expected to adhere to rituals of his forefathers.
The pagan Romans charged the Jews, to an extent, and the Christians, to a much greater extent, to have no tradition (religio) of their own. Therefore, Jews and Christians were devoid of religio and deemed as “atheists”.
The Christians did not have the privilege of having the Roman or even the Jewish tradition. Christians argued differently to demonstrate their legitimacy as religio. Instead of “ancient tradition hence legitimate” approach, the Christians transformed the question of legitimacy: Since their doctrine was ancient, therefore it was true and legitimate. The second question to Christians by pagan Romans was that even if their doctrine had been ancient, why should a doctrinal belief necessitate them to reject a common pubic practice? To this question, the Christians linked their practice to their doctrinal belief.
Please check Balu's lecture recorded by Arohi foundation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwe23-UpnME
The lecture is in Kannada. If you have followed Balu's research enough, you can make sense of it. Here is the stuff Balu discussed:
1. varna sankara: Gita and usage of duSTA. How Monier William’s dictionary gave the meaning for feminine duSTA translation just to accomodate this gita verse.
2. Purusa Sukta: the place of heart before the 19th century vs brain today
3. Shudra’s on the top; Brahmans at the bottom: Brihdarnya Upanishad
4. the so-called caste system in Maha Bhrata
5. Do classes exist in a tribal society? Rigvedic tribes?
6. AIT/AMT debates: how could chariots traverse the Afghan terrain when Soviet and American tankers couldn’t ?
7. Knowledge
1. critical discussion’ alone doesn’t lead to knowledge
2. one’s psychological attitude is necessary: ‘psychology of science’ studies this. Gita mentioned it 3K years ago
3. A description of Ashram in Mahabharata : interdisciplinary research center. Compare what our Gurus and Swamis sell in Ashrams today.
4. the absurdity of ‘vedic sciences’, ‘vedic knowledge’, etc, since ‘veda’ = ‘knowledge’
5. ‘Tapah Sakti’ =‘knowledge is power’
6. the nonsense that ‘vedic’ knowledge is hidden from others: Rigveda is religious poetry; since when poetry is knowledge? Books are not knowledge, any more than reading a physics book gives you knowledge. However, Bible, Quran, and Torah are knowledge, since they are God’s word; that’s why they are scriptures. Vedas are NOT scriptures.
7. ’Tapah’ is NOT ‘penance’. ‘Penance’ is for sinners, which all human beings are according to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
8. 'Tapah' is research. Does 'Tapah' give some powers like 'black magic'? See the relationship between 'esoteric' knowledge, the Devil, and 'black magic'
https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/who-says- ... eflectionsIndian traditions were once taps that brought life-giving water to us, Indians, says S N Balagangadhara. They taught us to live, in peace and content and seek happiness. “Because of the event of colonialism, Indians lost trust and faith in their own traditions.” Colonialism turned these taps off. This “did not merely sever our links to the land, to our past and indeed to knowing who we were. It also made us ignorant of the very existence of these taps, had us believe that these were useless drainage cisterns built by people from so-long-ago. We seem to have forgotten today that water came through them once. All we see are useless pipes, which work no more; that is what our own traditions have become to us now”.
We often see in Karnataka that scholars (and not lay people) find it extremely difficult to accept that the Lingayata tradition is an adhyatmic (spiritual) tradition. They see it as an insult to accept that a Basava or Allamais a gyani. Where has this assumption that adhyatma (spiritualism) is indifferent to ‘social problems’, come from? Since when?
I disagree. I think its merely a dual function of the story itself. By incorporating characters which exhibit mental and physical characteristics of various megafauna, it inculcates the idea in the reader from a young age that human society is part of nature. This plays a role in preserving the joint family structure as well. The second would be the message of the upanishads encoded in the story which shows that self is an inert emergent property which kills the idea that it is some sort of metaphysical entity (soul) given to us from God. This serves as a brake function on the idea that we must separate ourselves from nature due to our supposed uniqueness. According to the semites, animals don't go to heaven but humans do. They are merely gifted to us from god to serve us.A_Gupta wrote:http://indiafacts.org/anthropocentricit ... habharata/
Anthropocentricity of Modernity and its Effects on Ecology: Lessons from the Mahabharata
If anthropocentricity with respect to ecological problems is the problem – envisioning the universe as a dharmic system, in which we are instigated to be unselfish, is the answer.
This needs to spread far and wide, so Indians know that even yoga is not safe. Do not click unless you want your BP to rise: The Billionaire Yogi Behind Modi’s RiseThis narrative about yoga’s ancient roots has become a sacrament for Hindu nationalists, and it is echoed in the West. But it is mostly myth, an idealized origin story of the kind so many would-be nation-builders, from ancient Rome to the Zionists, have fostered about themselves. The oldest Hindu scriptures contain almost no mention of physical postures. Even the Yoga Sutras, the so-called bible of yoga, include only a few short verses suggesting comfortable postures for sitting. Many of the postures practiced in yoga today appear to have emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Dozens of modern ashtanga yoga postures are similar or identical to those found in a gymnastic routine introduced to India by the British in the first decades of the 20th century and originally developed by a Danish fitness instructor named Niels Bukh, who later became notorious for his pro-Nazi sympathies. Bukh, needless to say, has been conveniently forgotten by both Indians and the yoga-loving celebrities of Hollywood.
In Christendom, God is personal, loves all men, and sent his son to die not for the salvation of a singular nation but all mankind. Analysis of Dostoevsky’s Demons and The Brothers Karamazov indicates that Dostoevsky’s concept of Russian God is a uniquely Russian entity that diverges from biblically orthodox conceptions of God and faith. Underpinned by Russian nationalism, anti-Westernism, and Russian imperial doctrine, Dostoevsky’s Russian God notion emphasizes tribalism over Christian theological orthodoxy and is a footnote in the long history of state manipulation of religion in Russia.
obornost’ is an abstract Russian religious concept that was first articulated by Slavophilic thinker Alexei Khomiakov. It is a living community of believers that exists within the church and binds all together in Russian Orthodox faith. Sobornost’s community is explicitly exclusionary of Catholics, Protestants, and other Western denominations perceived as corrupt. According to Russian philosophy scholar Elena Besschetnova, “Khomiakov played a huge role in the formation of the Russian national identity, in the formation of the ‘Russian spirit’ and ‘Russian thought,’ giving to it religious connotation and its own special direction.” Sobornost’ thus has a relationship with Official Nationality and Russian chauvinism through its linkages to Russia’s exclusionary religious identity.
While Demons provides no explicit definitions or qualifying characteristics of either the Russian or European God, the quality of their being separate is both significant and utterly unbiblical. The Russian Orthodox monks in The Brothers Karamazov provide some insight to Russian God, in that Russian God should not be simply associated with Eastern Orthodoxy or Byzantine Rite. The monks chastise Constantinople’s leadership, saying:
We stick to the old ways, who cares what innovations they come up with; should we copy them all? … We’ve had as many holy fathers as they have. They sit there under the Turks and have forgotten everything. Their Orthodoxy has long been clouded. (p. 333)
Francis Fukuyama’s central contention still rings true: There is no conceivable ideological rival to liberal democracy.
“The end of history will be a very sad time,” he wrote, “I have the most ambivalent feelings” about it. He lamented the passing of the heroic age of mankind: “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by. . . the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” History had ended in the prefabricated, conformist lanes of suburbia. “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”
Fukuyama was echoing the critics of modernity who lamented the rise of the bourgeoisie for its lack of class and culture. A century and a half earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that, “Variety is disappearing from the human race,” because of the rise of liberal democracy, “the men of each country, more and more completely discarding the ideas and feelings peculiar to one caste, profession, or family, are all the same getting closer to what is essential in man, and that is everywhere the same.”
In those conditions of bland sameness, “All those turbulent virtues which sometimes bring glory but more often trouble to society will rank lower,” in liberal society. For Tocqueville, there was a real danger in the loss of those “turbulent virtues”: “What frightens me most is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring.
Thirty years ago, Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the end of the Cold War was “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” When he proclaimed the “End of History” he was not predicting the future; he was proclaiming a verdict: History had shown that liberal democracy was the most successful form of government by virtually every conceivable measure. History had ended in the sense that we had reached an answer to one of the key questions of the purpose (or telos, to be philosophically specific) of human civilization
The solution may be for the liberal state to step back and allow greater room for the pre-political institutions of society—the family, religious institutions, and civil society—to flourish and meet the spiritual needs of human beings. Only institutions like these can defang the natural human impulse toward political and religious fanaticism.
The revival of religion in some way attests to a broad unhappiness with the impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies.” Fukuyama’s appreciation for religion is part of why he is able to recognize the danger of post-historical ennui and yearning
9/11 forced the West to return to fundamental religious questions. Peter Thiel argues both capitalism and the enlightenment shut out such questions over the last 500 years. Capitalism wants "violent debates about truth...eliminated" as they're not conducive to making money.
4
The enlightenment preferred peace to ceaseless religious war. For peace, it was ready to pay the price of sweeping divisive religious questions under the carpet. Therefore "enlightenment" did the opposite of what the name suggests - it put the West into an "intellectual slumber."
5
Peter Thiel: "Locke says that it is in humanity’s nature to know nothing about the nature of humanity, Schmitt responds that is equally a part of the human condition to be divided by such questions and to be forced to take sides."
6
9/11 was the moment when people finally took sides. But Thiel writes the "unfolding confrontation between the West and Islam" is viewed very differently by the two sides. The Islamic side retains "a strong religious conception of reality" while the Western side doesn't.
7
In the West there's confusion on "why there should be a civilizational war at all." The West prefers to view the conflict as some miscreants resisting the legitimate project of liberal democracy, and skirts around entertaining the "larger meaning to the struggle."
8
But one side's indifference to a civilizational war doesn't mean it won't be fought. As Leo Strauss wrote, in a conflict one side's actions “will depend to a certain extent on what the enemy—possibly an absolutely unscrupulous and savage enemy—forces it to do.”
9
A nation is not just a mechanistic structure that needs occasional repairs. It is an organic being with a distinct personality that is born and can die. Strauss tried to pull people's attention to these founding conditions in which civilizations are born from disorder.
10
Bottom line. The enlightenment project & capitalism wish for religious questions to stay buried, but 9/11 forced them to the surface again. The adversarial nature of politics comes from these divisive religious questions. No amount of progress can make these questions irrelevant.
For many analysts the term Russky mir, or Russian World, epitomizes an expansionist and messianic Russian foreign policy, the perverse intersection of the interests of the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Little noted is that the term actually means something quite different for each party. For the state it is a tool for expanding Russia's cultural and political influence, while for the Russian Orthodox Church it is a spiritual concept, a reminder that through the baptism of Rus, God consecrated these people to the task of building a Holy Rus.
But, as Professor Andrei Tsygankov points out in his book Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin, Russia's relations with the West go through cycles that reflect its notion of honor.3 By honor he means the basic moral principles that are popularly cited within a culture as the reason for its existence, and that inform its purpose when interacting with other nations.
Over the past two centuries, in pursuit of its honor, Russia has cooperated with its European neighbors, when they have acknowledged it as part of the West; responded defensively, when they have excluded Russia; and assertively, when they have been overtly hostile to Russia's sense of honor.
Sometimes a nation's sense of its honor overlaps with present-day interests; but it cannot be reduced to the national interest alone, because political leaders must respond to existential ideals and aspirations that are culturally embedded. A nation's sense of honor, therefore, serves as a baseline for what might be called the long-term national interest.
According to Tsygankov, in Russia's case the long-term national interest revolves around three constants:
First, sovereignty or "spiritual freedom;"
second, a strong and socially protective state that is capable of defending that sovereignty;
and third, cultural loyalty to those who share Russia's sense of honor, wherever they may be.4 All three of these involve, to a greater or lesser extent, the defense of Orthodox Christianity, of the Russian Orthodox Church, and of Orthodox Christians around the world.
Since then, Putin has often returned to the dangers posed by American unilateralism, and even challenged the cherished notion of American exceptionalism.6 But, until his speech at the 2013 Valdai Club meeting, he did not explicitly say what values Russia stood for, what its sense of honor demanded. It was at this meeting that Putin first laid out his vision of Russia's mission as an Orthodox power in the 21st century.
Putin began his speech by noting that the world has become a place where decency is in increasingly short supply. Countries must therefore do everything in their power to preserve their own identities and values, for "without spiritual, cultural and national self-definition . . . . one cannot succeed globally."7
But, in a jab at the West, Putin notes that some aspects of pluriculturalism are no longer well received in the West. The values of traditional Christianity that once formed the very basis of Western civilization have come under fire there, and in their place Western leaders are promoting a unipolar and monolithic worldview. This, he says, is "a rejection . . . of the natural diversity of the world granted by God. . . . Without the values of Christianity and other world religions, without the norms of morality and ethics formed over the course of thousands of years, people inevitably lose their human dignity."10
The abandonment of traditional Christian values has led to a moral crisis in the West. Russia, Putin says, intends to counter this trend by defending Christian moral principles both at home and abroad.
For most of the 20th century, Western social science has insisted that modernization would render traditional cultural and religious values irrelevant. The modern alternative, which pioneer political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba labelled "civic culture," gravitates toward cultural homogeneity and secularism. These qualities lead to political stability and economic progress. The pattern is exemplified by Anglo-American societies which, they conclude, form the optimal model for a modern society.11
Half a century later, with the rise of China and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it no longer seems so obvious that secularism and homogeneity are the only paths to national success. Scholars increasingly speak of multiple paths to modernity, and even a resurgence of religion.12
Another reason why Putin's message was overlooked is that he is calling upon the West to re-connect with its Byzantine heritage, a heritage that it has often dismissed as non-Western. In Putin's mind, reincorporating Eastern Christianity into Western civilization reveals Russia as a vital part of Western civilization, and requires that Russia be part of any discussion of Western values.
More than a decade would pass before the term was used by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. This occurred in 2009 at the Third Assembly of the Russian World, when Patriarch Kirill spoke of how the Russky mir, or Holy Rus as he also called it, should respond to the challenges of globalization.15
The Church, he said, emphasizes the importance of spiritual bonds over the divisions of national borders. It therefore uses the term russky not as a geographical, or ethnic concept, but as a spiritual identity that refers to the cradle civilization of the Eastern Slavs—Kievan Rus.
Having drawn a distinction between the objectives of the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church in promoting the Russky mir, it is important to stress that these two institutions are not in conflict, at least not in the near future.29 The classical formulation for Church-State relations in Eastern Orthodox Christianity was and remains symphonia, or harmony between Church and State, not the Protestant Western ideal of separation. The establishment of broadly harmonious and mutually supportive relations between Church and State in Russia, for the first time in more than a century, therefore has significant implications for Russian politics.
If my assessment of the importance of the religious underpinnings for the current regime's popularity is correct, then it follows that attempts to undermine the unity of the Russky mir will be widely viewed as an attack on core values, not just in Russia but throughout the Russian World. Economic, political, cultural, and other sanctions will intensify this effect and sharply undermine intellectual and emotional sympathies for the West within this community. While this may not be permanent, I suspect that few in the current generation of Russian leaders retain much hope for the possibility of building a lasting partnership with the West.
For example, the Church sees the conflict in Ukraine as a civil war within the Russian World. From this perspective, it cannot be resolved by splitting up this community, thereby isolating Ukraine from Russia and destroying the unity of the Russky mir, or by permitting the forcible Ukrainianization of the predominantly Orthodox and Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, which would result in the destruction of the Russky mir within Ukraine. The only permanent solution is for the Ukrainian government to admit the pluricultural nature of Ukrainian society and, in effect, recognize Ukraine as part of the Russky mir. From the Church's perspective, this is the only way to achieve reconciliation among the Ukrainian people and harmony within the Russky mir.
"While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm. As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was vertical, East vs. West, the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite."39
The role of the Russian Orthodox Church in this struggle is crucial, because it calls for the creation of a common framework of Christian European values, in effect a new, pan-European civil religion. The Russian state, meanwhile, is only too happy to support these calls because it is only within the context of a common cultural and religious identity ("shared values") that Russia can become a full-fledged political part of the West. Intentionally or not, therefore, the Russian Orthodox Church and its Russky mir have emerged as the missing spiritual and intellectual component of Russia's soft power.
Like 1945 or 1980, the West is at an inflection point. In 1945, the West had to create new institutions of international governance, of defence, and of European cooperation in place of not one but two world wars caused by conflict between European nations.
In 1980, after years of nuclear proliferation, we sought the final collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of liberal democratic values.
In each case, the objective of Western foreign policy was accompanied by an objective of domestic policy.
In 1945, in Europe, in the UK under the Attlee government and in the USA, it was the building of a welfare state, modern infrastructure, health and education services to make available to the broad mass of the people what had hitherto been restricted to a privileged few.
In 1980, it was the Reagan/Thatcher revolution in favour of markets and private enterprise and in reaction against a burgeoning state power which seemed to hold back the enterprise of the people, not nurture it.
Agreeing or disagreeing with either inflection point is not what is material. What matters is that there was a governing project, a plan, a way of looking at the world which sought to make sense of it and provide for the advancement of the people.
In both cases, in their own terms at least, the project succeeded. Europe became at peace. The Soviet Union collapsed.
The political consequence over the past 15 years has been rampant populism. Traditional parties have seen a new generation of activists take them over, roiling conventional politics and laying blame for the condition of the people at the door of “elites”. The right has gone nationalist, placing as much emphasis on cultural as economic issues; the left to a mix of old-style state power as the answer to inequality and identity politics as the new radicalism. But there have also sprung up new parties, some green, some centrist, some to the far extremes of left and right.
Western politics is in turmoil – more partisan, ugly, unproductive; and fuelled by social media.
This has had its foreign-policy consequence. Recently a leader described to me their despair at trying to work out any consistency to American engagement in the world. Characterising the Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden administrations, he said: “too much; too little; too weird; too weak”. I pushed back. I think the characterisation genuinely unfair. In the case of each president, there were significant achievements, most recently in President Biden’s rallying of support for Ukraine. But what he really meant, I think, is that those dealing with America today feel American internal politics dominate external policy in a way destructive of policy coherence, an analysis unfortunately shared by those who are not our friends.
The effect of all this is that, to our own people, domestic politics appear dysfunctional; and to the outside world, foreign policy looks unpredictable. Neither helps the cause of Western democracy.
Today, Western democracy needs a new project. Something which gives direction, inspires hope, is a credible explanation of the way the world is changing and how we succeed within it.
The problem is 20th-century politics of right and left don't really fit with it; and politicians, now habitually more familiar with the politics of grievance, find it too “technocratic” and in any event too hard to understand.
But if we're searching for the overarching project for modern domestic governance, I believe understanding the technology revolution, accessing its vast opportunities and mitigating its undoubted risks, is it.
The question is what Ukraine means for wider Western foreign policy. A few years back, many people in the West even queried the need for something called “Western policy”. It sounded to some provocative, even aggressive, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and post 9/11. Ukraine largely removed that query.
However, the biggest geopolitical change of this century will come from China not Russia. We are coming to the end of Western political and economic dominance. The world is going to be at least bi-polar and possibly multi-polar.
This new inflection point is qualitatively different from 1945 or 1980. It is the first time in modern history that the East can be on equal terms with the West. And at both other inflection points, Western democracy was essentially in the ascendant.
That is not true of 2022. Or at least not clear.
The importance of Ukraine is that it clarifies. As a result of the actions of Putin, we cannot rely on the Chinese leadership to behave in the way we would consider rational.
But China will compete not just for power but against our system, our way of governing and living.
At least for now. And that is a crucial qualification.
I favour a policy towards China which is what I call “strength plus engagement”. We should be strong enough to deal with whatever China’s future disposition brings us, so that we maintain our system and its values. But we should not seek comprehensive “decoupling” or shut down lines of interaction or cooperation. We are clear-eyed but not hostile.
We should show that with different Chinese attitudes to us, come different attitudes from us; that we accept China’s status as a world power; that we respect Chinese culture and its people
Frequently there is a crude delineation made between “realpolitik” foreign policy – basically unprincipled, and “values-driven” foreign policy – that pursued by the decent people.
But values can't be protected unless we are strong enough to overcome those who oppose them. Strength doesn't come from wishful thinking but from hard-headed appreciation of reality.
Governments aren't NGOs. Leaders aren't writing commentaries; they're making policy.
I see this continually with my Institute working all over Africa and in South-East Asia. Not only China but Russia, Turkey, even Iran have been pouring resources into the developing world and putting down thick roots in the defence and political spheres. Meanwhile the West and the international institutions it controls have been bureaucratic, unimaginative and often politically intrusive without being politically effective.
There will shortly be launched the “One Shot” campaign to ensure that the new generation of vaccines and injectables for diseases like malaria, TB, dengue and even HIV/AIDS be made available to the developing world and elsewhere. Millions of lives could be saved. The West should lead it.
We must not relinquish leadership in the Middle East. This has nothing to do with oil. Or even security in the narrow sense of working with allies to thwart planned acts of terror. The modernisation movement sweeping the region – whose broad regional support is amply demonstrated by my Institute’s poll published earlier in the week – is massively important for our long-term security. The Abraham Accords with which I was involved, are proof the Middle East is changing. It is literally the last moment to give up on it.
India – which could and should achieve superpower status and is the world’s largest democracy – must be kept onside and inside our prioritisation and thinking. Building strong relations with emerging nations such as Indonesia is critical.
tl;dr: increase focus on jaichands + freedom/democracyLike 1945 or 1980, we can succeed. One of the lessons from my time spent out in the world since leaving office, is that in the end the human spirit wants to be free – and that spirit is uncrushable.
Back in April, an article by James Pogue in Vanity Fair revealed the emergence of a collection of “podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters”—sometimes called “‘dissidents,’ ‘neo-reactionaries,’ ‘post-leftists,’ or the ‘heterodox’ fringe . . . all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right”—who represented the “seam of a much larger and stranger political ferment, burbling up mainly within America’s young and well-educated elite.” That last bit about the demographics of this so-called New Right may have been what got the Times’s attention. But Pogue had even more striking news: these dissidents, he wrote, had established “a position that has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right–ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic.”
ew things are more natural for young people than to push back against the strictures and norms of their day, even if only to stand out a little from the crowd and assert their independence. A counterculture forms as a reaction against an official or dominant culture—and today, it is the woke neoliberal Left that occupies this position in America’s cultural, educational, technological, corporate, and bureaucratic power centers. In this culture, celebration of ritualized, old forms of transgression is not only permitted, but practically mandatory. Dissent against state-sponsored transgression, however, is now transgressive. All of what was once revolutionary is now a new orthodoxy, with conformity enforced by censorship, scientistic obscurantism, and eager witch-hunters (early-middle-aged, zealously dour, tight-lipped frown, NPR tote bag, rainbow “Coexist” bumper sticker, pronouns in email signature—we all know the uniform).
Moreover, young people living under the permanent revolution of today’s cultural mainstream often tend to be miserable. Their disillusionment opens the door to subversive second thoughts on such verities as the bulldozing of sexual and gender norms, the replacement of romance by a Tinder hellscape, general atomized rootlessness, working life that resembles neo-feudal serfdom, and the enervating meaninglessness of consumerism and mass media. In this environment, the most countercultural act is to embrace traditional values and ways of life—like the vogue among some young people for the Latin Mass. We shouldn’t be too surprised if at least a subset of those youth seeking to rebel against the Man might, say, choose to tune in to Jordan Peterson, turn on to a latent thirst for objective truth and beauty, and drop out of the postmodern Left.
As the populist academic Michael Lind recently argued, “If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star,” since at this point “intellectual life on the American center-left is dead.” The spirit of adventure and debate that once drove the Left has, as he wrote, “been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned,” while the mainstream marketplace of ideas is now filled with “the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds.”
Would-be comics who attempt, like the dull Soviet state satirical magazine Krokodil, to “correct with laughter” by mixing ideological regime propaganda with jokes simply end up being what the kids nowadays call “cringe.” The shackles of ideological dogma essentially block off the creative inspiration necessary for producing compelling art.
n contrast with this oppressive decadence of the mainstream Left, the dialectic of the countercultural Right crackles with irreverence and intellectual possibility. Across a growing ecosystem of YouTube videos, Twitter threads, Substack essays, online book clubs, and three-hour podcasts, exiles from the mainstream are looking to broaden their horizons, not only seeking alternative media but also excitedly discovering Christopher Lasch, debating John Locke, and discoursing on Livy. A hunger for forbidden knowledge and a yearning for genuine answers on political and cultural phenomena cloaked in official gaslighting has produced a legion of autodidacts, unrestrained by elite gatekeepers. And, finding themselves already outside the window of acceptability, and therefore no longer fettered by encrusted ideological orthodoxies or the need for self-censorship, many of these dissidents have no remaining reason to hesitate in pointing out when an establishment emperor has no clothes.
But it’s not their choice of reading material in itself that could make the new counterculture important politically. As the Trump administration belatedly discovered, taking nominal control of government through elections today has little impact on the direction of Leviathan. Even if the party officially running things changes, the vast unelected administrative state remains staffed by people educated in the same elite institutions, living in the same elite conclaves, and shaped by the same material incentives to signal acculturation to the same mannerisms, values, networks, career paths, and ideological priorities—what the realist Italian political theorist Gaetano Mosca would have called the same “political formula.”
Personnel is policy. If this entrenched, decidedly-not-neutral governing class doesn’t accept a new policy order, it won’t happen. Declaring a new direction for government without installing new personnel willing and able to carry it out generates only elite revolt and sabotage. High-level political appointees inserted into departments and agencies in an attempt to direct change are quickly isolated and rejected by the immune system of the bureaucratic host-body, pushed out like the foreign objects they are.
Veterans of the Trump administration appear belatedly to have grasped this reality, if reporting on a plan known as “Schedule F”—an attempt to replace a sizeable chunk of the “civil service” through executive order at the start of a new presidential administration—is accurate. But as Trump officials themselves have already seen, replacing all these personnel would be exceptionally difficult. In addition to the legal obstacles, nearly everyone with the skills and experience to do these jobs effectively is already an assimilated member of the same professional-managerial class. In fact, this status quo applies not just to government but to nearly every influential large organization, including corporations, major media outfits, universities, and nonprofits. All rely on recruitment from the professional-managerial elite to operate, and so are effectively beholden to the cultural preferences of that milieu.
A cultural break within what Pogue described as “America’s young and well-educated elite” would present a direct threat to the Left’s monolithic institutional power, one far greater than even the mass populist revolts that have thus far caused them such anxiety. Yet in the end, the Times, seemingly unable to resist the magnetic draw of Trump, chose to hire the populism-focused lead reporter of Buzzfeed’s infamous Russia-gate “exposé” on the Steele dossier to fill its new position. Perhaps they haven’t yet grasped the extent of the real threat after all.
Biologist John Calhoun built the colony at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland in 1968. It was a large pen—a 4½-foot cube—with everything a mouse could ever desire: plenty of food and water; a perfect climate; reams of paper to make cozy nests; and 256 separate apartments, accessible via mesh tubes bolted to the walls. Calhoun also screened the mice to eliminate disease. Free from predators and other worries, a mouse could theoretically live to an extraordinarily old age there, without a single worry.
But the thing is, this wasn’t Calhoun’s first rodent utopia. This was the 25th iteration. And by this point he knew how quickly mouse heaven could deteriorate into mouse hell.
Calhoun’s most famous utopia, number 25, began in July 1968, when he introduced eight albino mice into the 4½-foot cube. Following an adjustment period, the first pups were born 3½ months later, and the population doubled every 55 days afterward. Eventually this torrid growth slowed, but the population continued to climb, peaking at 2,200 mice during the 19th month.
Rodents have social hierarchies, with dominant alpha males controlling harems of females. Alphas establish dominance by fighting—wrestling and biting any challengers. Normally a mouse that loses a fight will scurry off to some distant nook to start over elsewhere.
But in mouse utopia, the losing mice couldn’t escape. Calhoun called them “dropouts.” And because so few juveniles died, huge hordes of dropouts would gather in the center of the pen. They were full of cuts and ugly scars, and every so often huge brawls would break out—vicious free-for-alls of biting and clawing that served no obvious purpose. It was just senseless violence. (In earlier utopias involving rats, some dropouts turned to cannibalism.)
As a result, apartments with nursing females were regularly invaded by rogue males. The mothers fought back, but often to the detriment of their young. Many stressed-out mothers booted their pups from the nest early, before the pups were ready. A few even attacked their own young amid the violence or abandoned them while fleeing to different apartments, leaving the pups to die of neglect.
d. Mice who had been raised improperly or kicked out of the nest early often failed to develop healthy social bonds, and therefore struggled in adulthood with social interactions. Maladjusted females began isolating themselves like hermits in empty apartments—unusual behavior among mice. Maladjusted males, meanwhile, took to grooming all day—preening and licking themselves hour after hour. Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.” And yet, even while obsessing over their appearance, these males had zero interest in courting females, zero interest in sex.
Intriguingly, Calhoun had noticed in earlier utopias that such maladjusted behavior could spread like a contagion from mouse to mouse. He dubbed this phenomenon “the behavioral sink.”
Between the lack of sex, which lowered the birth rate, and inability to raise pups properly, which sharply increased infant mortality, the population of Universe 25 began to plummet. By the 21st month, newborn pups rarely survived more than a few days. Soon, new births stopped altogether. Older mice lingered for a while—hiding like hermits or grooming all day—but eventually they died out as well. By spring 1973, less than five years after the experiment started, the population had crashed from 2,200 to 0. Mouse heaven had gone extinct.
hikkikomori ways of japanese men, incel ways of the western men, daily wage-slaving for no mating prospects among both genders, banshee screaming matches on social media, preference for pets or "fur-babies", anti-natalism, general animosity and hardened echo chambers, interesting experiment when satiation and plenitude do not inspire man as a collective to progress furtherCalhoun’s big takeaway involved status. Again, the males who lost the fights for dominance couldn’t leave to start over elsewhere. As he saw it, they were stuck in pathetic, humiliating roles and lacked a meaningful place in society. The same went for females when they couldn’t nurse or raise pups properly.
from the article quoted:hgupta wrote:https://borgenproject.org/theory-behavioral-sink/
Premise is that behavioral sink does not apply to humans.
sacrificing objectivity on the altar of perceived notions do not make strong scientific rebuttals, what may or may not be offensive is a subjective perception, the question is whether indulging in such activities is a deviant from the norm and / or in contravention to the biological conditioning to procreate, we may be progressing at the speed of science, but currently the union of male and female produces offspring, however much the outliers may wish to deny reality.The work eventually proved controversial for a few reasons: first, the behavior of mice cannot be used independently to understand the behavior of humans;
it never is, extrapolation of findings on humans is the usual process, when we see the r vs k population in the animals, do we not extrapolate them onto humans?, why do people conduct numerous sociological experiments on mice if they can be hand-waved to stating zero correlation to human behaviour, are scientists spending millions of dollars worldwide studying a secret society of mice if it is ultimately of no benefit to extrapolating to human conditions?
second, when scientists tried to study the behavioral sink theory in humans, they had to decide which human behaviors they would consider similar to the unusual behavior of the mice. For instance, some mice exhibited different sexual behaviors ranging from asexuality to bisexuality; and third, in order to detect this behavior in human beings, some researchers used STDs and illegitimacy as equivalents, an obviously offensive comparison.
wiki saysThe other controversy involved further experiments that proved the theory of behavioral sink did not hold up in human populations. Psychologist Jonathan Freedman conducted a similar, but significantly more humane, experiment with students to observe their behavior in situations of overcrowding in which he found no negative effects of overcrowding, but instead of over-socialization.
oversocialisation is another term for groupthink, the person is whipped by the feedback from society to conform to the mores of the day or risk being ostracised, a veritable pavlovian conditioning, so when the quote says that no behavioural sink was observed in humans, which is the transmission of behaviour among the wider masses connected by proximity (physical in the experiment, mental for the present day), but oversocialisation, a behaviour induced by conforming to feedback by the wider masses, I do not really know how the experimenter reached the conclusion, when they indicate the same malaise.A focus on innate behavior at the expense of learning is termed undersocialization, while attributing behavior to learning when it is the result of evolution is termed oversocialization.
But the “neocon” label came to be used after 9/11 to denote a particular strain of conservatism that placed human rights and democracy promotion at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy.
Traditional conservatives, such as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to teach the Taliban and Saddam Hussein a lesson and then depart each country as quickly as possible. The neoconservative position—which eventually triumphed in the George W. Bush administration—was that the United States could not simply topple the old regimes and leave chaos in their wake. The Americans had to stay and work with local allies to build democratic showcases that could inspire liberal change in the Middle East. In this way, Washington could finally lance the boil of militant Islamism, which had afflicted America ever since the Iran hostage crisis in 1979.
Although I remain a supporter of democracy and human rights, after seeing how democracy promotion has worked out in practice, I no longer believe it belongs at the center of U.S. foreign policy. In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking. I am a neocon no more, at least as that term has been understood since 9/11.
The United States should continue to champion its ideals and call out human rights abuses, but it should do so with humility and not be ashamed to prioritize its own interests. Foreign policy cannot be solely or even mainly an altruistic exercise, and attempting to make it so is likely to backfire in ways that will hurt the very people Americans are trying to help.
I would never have supported military action had I known that he was not actually building weapons of mass destruction, but what I really wanted was to get rid of Iraq’s cruel dictator, not just his purported weapons program. One of the central arguments that I and other supporters of an invasion made was that regime change could trigger a broader democratic transformation in the Middle East.
he has learned his lesson, has grown and apologised, i think it is a fair assessment, that his ilk of war-mongers be now forgiven, it only cost a few hundred thousand lives, regional destabilisation, mass poverty, and end of many peoples that had lived and thrived so far with the rest of us in human history, and that the action of his and his brethren still continues to mutate and multiply in the middle east, the LUGENPRESSE has assumed a small amount of blame in their war propagation, it is all goodI now cringe when I read some of the articles I wrote at the time. “This could be the chance to right the scales, to establish the first Arab democracy, and to show the Arab people that America is as committed to freedom for them as we were for the people of Eastern Europe,” I wrote in The Weekly Standard—the now defunct flagship of the neoconservative movement—a month after 9/11. “To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim.”
I desperately wanted to believe that spreading freedom could solve the security dilemmas confronting the United States—that by doing good in the world, it could also serve its national security interests.
Who were Americans to think that they could transform an entire region with thousands of years of its own history? I am still kicking myself for not paying greater attention to a wise op-ed I ran in 2002, when I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal. Under the headline “Don’t Attack Saddam,” the experienced foreign policy hand Brent Scowcroft accurately predicted that an invasion of Iraq would require “a large-scale, long-term military occupation” and would “swell the ranks of the terrorists.” I discounted such warnings because I was dazzled by the power of the U.S. military after its victories in the Gulf War and the invasion of Afghanistan—and dazzled also by the arguments of neoconservative scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami that Iraq offered fertile soil for democracy. In hindsight, I am amazed and appalled that I fell prey to these mass delusions.
this mfuker learned nothing, nothing, a hundred years of experience and he will still be chained to a bedpost like the beast that he is, mindlessly undertaking his masters' biddingsLike the war in Vietnam, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq offered a potent warning about the dangers of good intentions gone awry. The 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya under the Obama administration, which I also supported, later confirmed on a smaller scale those same lessons. The United States and its allies bombed Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces, leading to his overthrow and murder, but the result was not the blooming of a Jeffersonian democracy in the desert. To this day, Libya remains trapped in a Hobbesian hell of internecine warfare and lawlessness. In all those countries, the United States was so eager to spread democracy, just as it was once eager to contain communism, that it inflicted great misery on the very people it was supposed to be helping—and then left them in the lurch.
Last October, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is often described as a neoconservative think tank, released a paper calling for the “maximum support for the Iranian people.” Most of what the report recommended—such as using “cyber capabilities in support of protesters,” enabling “censorship circumvention,” expanding “human rights sanctions,” and condemning “Iran within international organizations”—was eminently sensible. Much of it, indeed, was already being implemented by the Biden administration. But FDD went too far in calling for an end to diplomatic efforts to get Iran to rejoin the nuclear deal that U.S. President Donald Trump foolishly exited in 2018.
The only obvious alternative to a diplomatic solution is a military solution. Years ago, I might have said this was a risk worth running (indeed, I basically suggested as much in 2011), but given how advanced the Iranian nuclear program has become, I no longer believe that. As I wrote in 2019, airstrikes are unlikely to destroy all of Iran’s well-protected nuclear facilities, and they could well trigger a regional conflagration. They could even backfire by convincing Iran to actually build a nuclear weapon. It would be wonderful if liberal protesters were to overthrow the regime and end its nuclear program, but most Iran experts seem to agree that there is no imminent danger of regime collapse. Indeed, protests that began in the fall have already waned. And there is no reason to think that any amount of U.S. intervention, short of outright invasion, could hasten the fall of the ayatollahs.
Of course, the whole debate is academic at the moment, because the hard-liners in Tehran have shown no willingness to rejoin a deal they abhor as much as U.S. and Israeli hard-liners do. No doubt, like other dictators around the world (such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un), the mullahs have studied recent history and drawn the logical conclusions: Qaddafi and Saddam were overthrown by the United States after giving up their weapons of mass destruction programs. Hence, any dictator who wants to stay in power should develop a nuclear arsenal. This is yet another way that the U.S. zeal in spreading democracy has backfired.
At this point, there are few good options left with Iran. U.S. or Israeli covert action—assassinating weapons scientists or spreading computer viruses—will only slightly delay a program that can soon produce a nuclear weapon. Washington should keep trying to reach a diplomatic breakthrough, but assuming that fails, it will need to rely on deterrence and containment, as it did during the Cold War. That means resisting the spread of Iranian power by working through regional allies such as Israel and the Gulf states and making clear to Iran that any use of nuclear weapons would lead to its own destruction.
No matter how abhorrent the Iranian regime is, the United States should, if possible, return an ambassador to Tehran to open lines of communication. Likewise, Washington needs to maintain close contact with Beijing to avoid a nuclear confrontation, even as it condemns the regime’s egregious human rights abuses, from Xinjiang to Hong Kong. So, too, does the United States need to talk to Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, even as it condemns the murder of The Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi and the imprisonment of dissidents. The United States cannot simply cut off a country that is a key ally against Iran and the world’s top oil exporter.
the word of the us is now worth spit, trust all agreements signed with them as mere placeholders for an eventual win-lose dealAs I suggested in November, to the outrage of the right, the United States might be able to do more for the people of Cuba and Venezuela by easing sanctions in return for human rights improvements rather than demanding regime change. Likewise, it should not be afraid to offer North Korea an easing of sanctions in exchange for a freeze or rollback of its nuclear program, even if that results in more money for the country’s Stalinist regime. (Of course, Pyongyang has shown no interest in such a deal.)
Washington should still call out human rights abuses. It should still champion liberal dissidents...
The United States remains the world’s most powerful liberal democracy, and it has a moral obligation to at least speak up for its principles.
But there is a crucial difference—one I did not sufficiently appreciate in the past—between defending democracy and exporting democracy. The United States has a better track record of the former (think Western Europe during the Cold War) than the latter (think Afghanistan and Iraq).
not for the lack of trying...U.S. success in transforming Germany, Italy, and Japan after World War II. What we failed to grasp was that these countries benefited from unique historical circumstances—including high levels of economic development, widespread social trust, strong states, and a blank slate created by defeat in a total war—that, it turns out, are nearly impossible to replicate. It was and is foolish to try.
Even when it comes to defending democracy, Washington must sometimes make difficult decisions based on a realistic assessment of local conditions far removed from the airy abstractions favored in U.S. political debates.
I still opposed the pullout negotiated by Trump and executed by President Joe Biden because I thought it was possible to keep the Taliban out of power at relatively low cost, and I feared the dangerous signal that a U.S. exit would send to other aggressors. Today, I favor maintaining U.S. military advisers in Iraq as a hedge against the power of Iran and the resurgence of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). But those are much more modest objectives than the ones I envisioned 20 years ago. The time I spent with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past two decades gave me a greater appreciation for the importance of local dynamics. No matter how powerful or well intentioned, outsiders can barely understand local societies, much less manipulate them successfully.
There is, of course, an age-old debate in U.S. foreign policy over the role of values versus interests. In the 1820s, when the Greeks were fighting a war of independence, many American philhellenes wanted to aid their struggle against the cruelty of the Ottoman Empire. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams resisted those entreaties, famously proclaiming that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” In the past, I have bridled at Adams’s words, which have often been cited by isolationists.
But I would no longer make democracy promotion the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy, because I don’t have much confidence that the United States knows how to do it successfully and because other priorities (such as economic security and national security) have to be considered, too.
Its actual record of covert action is far less impressive, and on those few occasions when it helped pull off successful coups, the results have usually backfired. The Iranian mullahs still teach their people about American perfidy by citing the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953.
Washington should support liberal protesters with words of encouragement, communications technologies, and other nonmilitary assistance, but it should not count on their success, and it should keep in mind that when a dictatorship falls, the alternative is not always preferable.
But in some ways, I am harking back to the vision of the original neocons, who were united in their opposition to Soviet designs but hardly advocated a crusade for freedom abroad.
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat who was one of the most important neocon intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up. She first came to fame by writing a 1979 Commentary article called “Dictatorships and Double Standards” that argued for making common cause with “moderate autocrats friendly to American interests” despite their human rights violations. That led directly to her appointment as U.S. ambassador to the UN under President Ronald Reagan. As a member of Reagan’s cabinet, she did not want to support the United Kingdom during the 1982 Falklands War because she viewed the Argentine military junta as a bulwark against the expansion of communism in Latin America. Later, long after leaving office, she came to oppose the U.S. invasion of Iraq, arguing that “Iraq lacked practically all the requirements for a democratic government.” Kirkpatrick’s worldview should make clear that democracy promotion was hardly integral to neoconservatism as originally conceived.
So what was neoconservatism about? In the very first issue of the neoconservative publication The Public Interest, in 1965, its founders—Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol—expressed suspicion of all attempts to oversimplify complicated public policy issues by falling back on “ideology, whether it be liberal, conservative or radical.” That magazine would become a forum for dense, closely argued essays on vexing social science problems, not for sweeping ideological manifestos. In explaining the name of their magazine, Bell and Kristol cited the columnist Walter Lippmann’s definition of the “public interest”: “The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.”
After the Vietnam War, a generation of U.S. leaders developed what became known as “Vietnam syndrome”—a pathological belief that public support for the use of force was too fleeting, and the U.S. military’s power too uncertain, for foreign military operations to be advisable. This syndrome bedeviled U.S. decision-making for years, but by the mid-1980s, its power had begun to wane.
But in reality, the success of Operation Desert Storm reinforced the idea that the public would tolerate only short, low-casualty conflicts.
Two decades after the initial invasion, Iraq remains a security project in progress. Compared with the United States’ outright defeat in Afghanistan, the result of the U.S. campaign in Iraq looks like a modest success. It still might be possible to achieve some of the goals of the war—an Iraq that can govern and defend itself and that is an ally in the war against terrorists—albeit at a tragically high price.
And the shock has had the same result: policymakers have developed Iraq syndrome and now believe that the American public has no stomach for military operations conducted on foreign soil
As a consequence, U.S. policymakers who wish to use force must fight as bloodlessly as possible and be quick to abandon their commitments if the adversary proves able to fight back and kill U.S. soldiers. The politically expedient position, in a world afflicted by Iraq syndrome, is a quasi-isolationist one, since the public is not willing to underwrite the costs of lasting international commitments.
American voters are not nearly as allergic to military force as their leaders think. In fact, the public will continue to adequately support a military mission even as its costs mount, provided that the war seems winnable. That means policymakers do not need to abandon a national security commitment as soon as the costs start to mount, provided that the leaders are pursuing a strategy that will lead to success.
Obama avoided meaningful intervention in the Syrian civil war, for instance, despite the fact that the humanitarian costs of staying on the sidelines arguably dwarfed the costs of invading Iraq. He also delayed taking forceful action until the very last moment against the Islamic State, or ISIS, a formidable terrorist organization that quickly eclipsed al Qaeda and threatened to plunge the entire Middle East into chaos in 2015 and 2016.
But if politicians and policymakers are clearly afflicted, there is less evidence that the public at large has caught Iraq syndrome. For starters, even during the Iraq war, the public was not casualty-phobic. Contrary to the expectations of many, the U.S. public largely made reasoned and reasonable assessments of the war.
But isolationism has not firmly gripped the broader public, which remains generally internationalist in orientation with a high level of confidence in the military, particularly in comparison with other institutions. According to a 2023 Gallup survey, 65 percent of Americans felt that the United States should take a leading or major role in world affairs—only a small decline from February 2001, when 73 percent of Americans held that opinion.
The Iraq war was a sea change for many who were directly affected by the conflict—both inside and outside of the United States. But it appears to have had less of an impact on the broader U.S. public, which remains solidly internationalist, confident in the nation’s military power and institutions, and able to make reasoned trade-offs between the likely costs (especially human cost) and potential security benefits of intervention, as well as the likelihood of success.
war propagandists should be flogged in streetsAnd just as U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush found it possible to rally the public behind military interventions even in the wake of Vietnam, Biden or his successors may find the public similarly persuadable after Iraq. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
What we can see, especially in European history (where the largest body of recorded evidence for this exists) is that often two, sometimes three ordering principles coexisted in
competition with one another.1
At the risk of great oversimplification, one can identify four patterns, if we leave aside complete anarchy.
1) interesting to note that the idea of hinduism and the mandate of heaven have been used in the same category, the "the predominance of one such power over allThe first and probably most natural was that of a
number of polities—city states in Ancient Greece and
Medieval Italy, larger principalities in Ancient India and
medieval and early modern South-East Asia—trading with
each other but also vying for pre-eminence. Several times,
this became a balance-of-power contest, with alliances
forming to check an increasingly rich or even visibly
expansionist power or rival alliance
Underpinning ideologies like that which grew on the back of Hinduism in India and then Southeast Asia or in China,
describing the predominance of one such power over all
others, as a “mandate of heaven”, or in the Christian and
Islamic case, linking predominance with a divine injunction
to proselytize, or Communism with its missionary zeal,
often led to wars when there was resistance to conquest, the
latter checked only, eventually, by the danger of nuclear
war.
sounds like freedom and democracy talk to me, or the author has identified and is in the process of codifying a new doctrineFor the bid for pre-eminence and even total domination can
take any form along a long spectrum: from utterly
malevolent, incarnated by Adolf Hitler and his strategy for
the domination of the Aryan race and the extermination and
enslavement of what he saw as inferior races, to intentions
of truly bringing peace and prosperity to all of mankind.
intriguing notionFor all their sins, and the admixture of the craving for power
and enrichment, Islam, Christianity, Communism and the
Western democracies’ promotion of human rights all aimed
to benefit the rest of mankind. This quest for a universal
system ensuring peace, then, was the ordering principle
opposed to balance-of-power relations: the ideal, only ever
partly realised, of a world in which all entities were
integrated into a larger union ensuring peace among them.
the United Nations (UN) were founded to create
such a universal system, a world-wide order of peace. It
should make America’s enemies think, that the USA never
endeavoured to establish a world empire based on
universal physical dominion.
Entities thus making their independence the
highest principle guiding their policies were at loggerheads
with the inferred or open claim to universal authority made
by the two successive Roman Empires. When they were not
opposing a power showing signs of imperial expansionism,
sovereignist polities would revert to balance-of-power
strategies among themselves, and to settling quarrels by
war. Thus, the insistence on sovereignty and the reversion
to the ordering principle of balances of powers was indeed
antithetically opposed to the aim of creating a larger union
or sphere of peace.
A third ordering principle emerged when among
multiple competing powers there were a handful of powers
greater than the others who felt entitled to determine the
fate of the world. Three times, such a group of five great
powers jointly set out to bring order to the world by
adjudicating the quarrels of minor powers: with the
Congress System that existed in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, with the League of Nations created in 1920,
and again with the UN founded in 1945.
All three
pentarchieswere flawed, however. Already in the first, the
great powers did not put aside their own national and
colonial ambitions which led them both within and outside
Europe. The Congress System that had aimed to settle
issues for the greater good of Europe as a whole was thus
contaminated by balance-of-power thinking among the five
great powers, to which it gave way altogether by midcentury.
Fourthly, several times in history balance-of-power
patterns were fused with alignments of powers according
to ideology (counting religious or confessional differences
as ideologies). These could take several forms: alliances of
ferociously selfish (i.e., nationalist) powers, keeping each
other’s backs free when they set out on wars of conquest or
fought a common enemy, or a hunted down a common prey
as Hitler and Stalin did in their joint occupation of Poland
in 1939.
By contrast, alliances sharing values that they
believed should spread to all of humanity, such as a
proselytising religion or ideology, proved more enduring.
Alliances of Western democracies, not least due to their joint
decision-making, have proved less aggressive as there
tended to be some member(s) that would voice concerns
and veto action.
??, i suppose having an ultra nationalist government disturbs the tranquillity of the established system-of-systems and tends to assert a balance-of-power system, which is dangerous for global peaceStates trying
to support human rights find themselves at a loss of what
to do when free elections produce the return of intolerant,
war-mongering, terrorist-supporting or ultra-nationalist
governments.
Interestingly, this is the point that the MEA strongly emphasises whenever the quad is mentioned, a temporary convergence and convenience of parties with common interests, but not based on firm mutual commitments borne of common values, this would be the biggest difference between the unipolar and multipolar worldThe new world is also marked by a shift away from the
inclusive multilateral International Organisations, most of
them outgrowths of the UN or founded on the UN’s
encouragement of regional co-operation through such
institutions, which were favoured by many states over the
last 70 years, even if some of these organizations were little
other than talking shops.
Instead, we currently see a shift away from binding
commitments that were designed to be long-lasting, in
NATO and the EU and of course the UN, to ad-hockery,
alliances of convenience and of temporary convergences of
interests, which undermine the ordering principle of firm mutual commitments based on common values that pertained during the Cold War.
So how is the Biden Administration trying to influence
this transition with its new NS?
Essentially, there are three main options when
confronted with such a transition, the fourth being a mix of
them. The first is to try to stem the tide, the second is to
stand aside, and the third is to hasten it. Unsurprisingly,
neither the second nor the last are true options for the great
power that contributed most to bringing the current order
into being, even if it has occasionally shrugged off its rules
to act as it saw fit. Equally unsurprisingly, then, we find a
mix of approaches in the new U.S. NSS of October 2022.
Yet differences become clear when contrasted with the previous
Trump Administration’s NSS of 2017. They are, first and
most obviously, that the Biden NSS of 2022 recommits
America to uphold the UN’s norms which was relegated to
a much lower ranking in the previous NSS of 2017 issued
under President Trump.3 The latter had adopted a “Realist”
view of International Relations, assuming that “a contest for
power” was “a central continuity in history”. It had
recognised “that the United States often views the world in
binary terms, with states being either ‘at peace’ or ‘at war,’
when it is actually an arena of continuous competition.”
This airbrushed out of the picture the muting of this contest
for power that existed in its place, among the powers who prioritised, since 1945 if not since 1928, the year of the
Briand-Kellogg Pact, peaceful interaction globally where at
all possible, even peaceful coexistence with ideological
rivals, and close, restricting co-operation with likeminded
nations. The Trump NSS went on to say, “Our adversaries
will not fight us on our terms. We will raise our competitive
game to meet that challenge, to protect American interests,
and to advance our values.” By implication, this accepted
the result of the transition, the return to something very
akin to the Great Power Competition of the 19th century that
killed off the Congress System, by changing one’s own
game to mirror the adversary’s. The strategy adopted by
the Trump Administration aimed to “shift trends back in
favor of the United States, our allies, and our partners”, but
it was ready to do so by accepting the new rule of the game:
power struggle. In keeping with Donald Trump’s overall
policies, the 2017 NSS put the strengthening of America’s
sovereignty above that of any international co-operation—an
approach to the sovereignty of their own states on which
both Putin and Xi Jinping would have agreed.
There is of course, in America, just as among other states
founded on philosophical ideals, e.g., Communist regimes
past and present, the assumption that what is in the
American (or what is Communist) interest is ultimately in
the interest of the world, as countries the world over would
benefit from having the same constitution and way of life as
one’s own
By contrast, the Biden Administration is endeavouring
to stem the transformation of the international system,
maintaining the liberal commitment to create and uphold
“institutions norms and standards … [with] mechanisms
[that] advanced America’s economic and geopolitical aims
and benefited people around the world by shaping how
governments and economies interacted … in ways that
aligned with U.S. interests and values.”4
We also see a pragmatic
embracing of “minilateral” arrangements, which in the case
of the US in the Indo-Pacific is actually a step towards
greater multilateralism: previously, its security
arrangements in that part of the world were generally
bilateral.6
In short, the 2022 NSS is trying to find a middle way
between the preservation of the great acquis of the rulesbased order enshrined in the UN, and the reality of
competition from a militarily dangerous Russia and an
economically powerful China with an alternative set of
values
It tries to preserve as much as possible of
the post-1945 rules-based international order, in cooperation with the like-minded governments, while
optimistically asserting that its internal values allow the
U.S.A. to retain a competitive edge vis-à vis its competitors.
America’s friends and allies can only hope that this
optimism is well-founded.